Change Makers

The #SASS Change Maker initiative offers a series of extra-curricular seminars held regularly throughout the academic year to help develop students' learning and awareness of topical and current social issues. We aim to support the work that current and former students are involved in on campus and within their communities.

Change Makers continues to engage students and staff in topical discussions such as Black Lives Matter and the Criminal Justice system, Women's Health and Vagina Dialogues, Contextual Safeguarding, and more recently the Pathways film premier which explores the black British experience from a UOB student perspective. This reflects the strong commitment, shared by staff and students alike, to create and sustain a fairer society and to get students to realise their responsibility in promoting change and social justice. #SASS Change Makers is a student-led and staff initiative that offers a unique opportunity for our students and staff to engage with charities, practitioners, alumni and professionals offering relevant content to the varied modes of study and a means to enhance student employability prospects here at the University of Bedfordshire.

The introduction of #SASS Change Makers to students is an attempt to raise student aspirations, recognise, and celebrate the difference and impact that students make in their communities locally, and internationally through a narrative of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy that enables students to cultivate meaningful connections with their learning and their community. Changemakers creates an inclusive academic community which promotes belonging and learning for both students and staff.

Upcoming Events

November 22nd 2024
9:30am - 5:00pm

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

Join us for an insightful presentation event showcasing the groundbreaking postgraduate dissertations of our students, This event will feature research on a range of important topics, including:

Adverse childhood experiences
Care leavers
Asylum seekers in the UK
Parental incarceration/immigration detention and the effects on children
School exclusion
Drug abuse
Refugee family reunification

Refreshments will be provided from 3pm

January 30th 2025
9:30am - 5:00pm

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

More info to follow...

February 3rd 2025
9:00am - 5:00pm

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

The symposium invites UOB students and staff and industry practitioners to engage in a series of workshops and discussions that explore addiction as a mode of protest and its impact on family and friends.

Addiction as a facet encompasses all aspects of social life. If you are a professional, a service user, parent or carer of someone impacted by addictive behaviours and substance dependency, come and listen to lived experience, life narratives and engage with experts, service users and professionals throughout the day, including University of Bedfordshire alumni Rodica Tomescu & Elizabeth Odudimu, CEO of Family Support Link Kate Peake, and artist Antonia Rolls.

March 7th 2025
9:30am - 5:00pm

More info to follow...

March 12th & 13th 2025
9:30am - 5:00pm

More info to follow...

March 18th 2025

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

More info to follow...

Past events

November 4th 2024
10:30am - 1:30pm

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

This event is aimed at youth work practitioners from a range of settings including statutory, voluntary, faith, community and third sector organisations, to come together and celebrate youth work taking place across the county. If you would like to have a stand or area in the venue to represent your youth work organisation, please contact tina.salter@beds.ac.uk to reserve an exhibition space.

We will also be exploring the future of youth work in light of potential changes to the political landscape this year, from a local and national perspective. Lisa Hudson will be presenting the work being done to make Luton a child-friendly town. Other presenters to be confirmed.

Refreshments and lunch provided.

Agenda

09:30 - 10:00 - Registration
Please make your way to the ground floor of the Postgraduate Centre, Luton Campus, University of Bedfordshire to register. Tea/Coffee can be purchased in the campus restaurant opposite the Postgraduate Centre.
10:00 - 11:30 - Session 1: Good youth work practice across our region
11:30 - 11:45 - Coffee break
11:45 - 13:00 - Session 2: What should youth work look like in the future?
13:00 - 14:00 - Lunch and the opportunity to network

November 15th 2024
9:30am - 5:00pm

University of Bedfordshire Postgraduate Centre
University Square
Luton
LU1 3JU

Join us for an inspiring one-day symposium focused on interdisciplinary knowledge exchange, where we will interrogate creative research within areas of activism, community development, participation, practice-based research in teaching, technology, arts and heritage. Save your seat and come and share your creative methods or learn about others that make an invaluable contribution to research.

Agenda

09:30 - 10:00 - Networking Coffee and Registration
10:00 - 10:15 - Welcome - Professor Andrew Church
10:15 - 11:00 - Professor Dawn Mannay, Cardiff University: ‘It’s written in the Sand"

In this talk, I reflect on some of my engagements with creative research methods, thinking through aspects of design, data production, analysis and dissemination. There is a focus on ‘sandboxing’, drawing on my work with care-experienced children, mothers and mature students, as well as a range of international sandboxing research. The sandboxing method was developed from the tradition of play therapy, specifically the World Technique, where children create three dimensional scenes, pictures, or abstract designs with a range of miniature, realistic and fantasy, figures and everyday objects in a tray filled with sand. We adapted this therapeutic practice, to create as a distinctive tool to support qualitative data generation, which we named sandboxing. The technique has been used with children, young people, and adults who create sand scenes and discuss their metaphorical meanings in elicitation interviews.
11:00 - 12:30 - Panel 1. Dr Lisa McKenzie; Dr Sireita Mullings; Dr Lena Opfermann; Derek Wilmer

Dr Lisa Mckenzie - Community Storytelling; Dr Sireita Mullings - Principles and Elements of design: Ethnography of Backway; Derek Wilmer - Where do ideas come from? and why we shall never know. Dr Lena Opfermann - Embodied Knowledge Production: Epistemology and Practice
12:30 - 13:15 - Lunch
13:15 - 14:00 - Workshops in breakout spaces

Break Out Room 1 - Collage for Creative Thinking in Research; Dr Roma Thomas

This workshop invites participants to use the medium of collage as a creative tool for developing your thinking in research. Collage (cutting, pasting and creating compositions from paper and other materials) can provide creative tools which allow us to expanding our thinking and express ourselves more freely than conventional written methods. Using the example of thinking through your positionality in research, this workshop will introduce you to collage as a creative tool to channel your thinking. Using a variety of paper materials, you will create a visual representation of your positionality in research. What to bring: Please feel free to bring magazines, papers, cards, photos and other paper materials that you are happy to cut up. If you bring photos, do bring copies rather than originals.

Break Out Room 2 - Harnessing Mini Zines as a Tool for Creativity and Engagement; Dr Hoda Wassif & Dr Maged Zakher

Harnessing Mini Zines as a Tool for Creativity and Engagement Workshop. a tool for creative expression and classroom engagement. Over the course of 45 minutes, attendees will discover practical strategies for integrating mini zines into their classroom environment, harnessing their potential to facilitate reflection, enhance dialogue, and support a creative classroom dynamics. Workshop Objectives: - Introduce participants to the concept of mini zines and their versatile applications in educational contexts. - Demonstrate how mini zines can serve as powerful tools for promoting reflection and creativity among learners. - Provide techniques for utilising mini zines to enhance classroom engagement and foster active participation across diverse learning environments. A practical, hands on workshop; participants will have the skills, rationale and application techniques for how to effectively use mini zines in education settings.

Breakout Room 3 - Sandboxing; Dr Joanne Hill

Sandboxing: digging around for meaning in participatory creative methods ‘Sandboxing’ provides an opportunity for participants to create three-dimensional scenes in sand-trays, employing miniature figures and everyday objects (Mannay, Staples and Edwards,. 2017). Sand and mini figures offer a tactile way for participants to respond to a prompt, build/rebuild, and tell a story about the world they have created in miniature. Sand is furthermore a natural material and may have especial use for exploring engagement with the natural world, nature, or the outdoors. This workshop will invite participants to engage with sand trays, mini figures and natural objects, to play and share ideas for the uses of sandboxing (and supporting elicitation techniques) in their field of research.
14:00 - 14:45 - International Panel: Methods from across the water
Gleb Raikov; Juan-Carlos Sandoval-Rivera; Sireita Mullings; Njaka Chinelo

You will hear the work of Raikov, Gleb (Centre Pierre Naville, Paris-Saclay University) whos recent presentation was titled - Apprehending visual politics in filmic research on the supportive care in the field of cancerology; Sandocal-Rivera, Juan-Carlos (Universidad Veracruzana).Explored environmental education through photography-based methodologies: challenges and paradoxes in achieving the SDG’s in Mexico along with Njaka, Chinelo (Goldsmiths College, University of London), who in 2024 presented her paper titled, Piecing the Archives: Recovering Hidden Black Quilting Narratives in the Black Atlantic. And Halasz, Katalin (Brunel University London), Hunter, Shona (Leeds Beckett University). You Are Invited.
14:45 - 15:30 - World Café - Dr Adrienne Sharples & James Andrew
15:30 - 15:45 - Break
15:45 - 16:30 - Panel 2. Associate Professor Camille Warrington; Dr Claire Cody; Dr Tom Hoctor

Associate Professor Camille Warrington - Participatory visual and creative methods when working with vulnerable people Dr Claire Cody - Using comedy with young survivors of sexual violence in Albania, Serbia and Uganda Dr Tom Hoctor - Finding the Global in the Local and the Local in the Global: How can ethnography help make sense of transnational lives and structures?
16:30 - 16:45 - Closing remarks